“How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don’t, there’s no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside.”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.com
“I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.”— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com
“Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to…”— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com
“I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe.”— Vladimir Nabokov, amazon.com
“What is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. I know anger. My body contains as much anger as water. It is the material from which I have built my house: blood red bricks that cry in the rain…. It is the face and posture…”— Joseph Beam, amazon.com
“Now something that you formerly loved as a truth or probability strikes you as an error; you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason. But perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person —you are always a different person —as are all y…”— Friedrich Nietzsche, amazon.com
“If we understand the matter correctly (something that must be assumed here) we can compel a person, or at least help him, to render an account of the ultimate meaning of his own actions.”— Max Weber, amazon.com
“… There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am…”— Bret Easton Ellis, Patrick Bateman , amazon.com
“The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a 'character' in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his spec…”— Hannah Arendt, amazon.com
“There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being— flesh, blood, skin, hair— but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, th…”— Bret Easton Ellis, Patrick Bateman , amazon.com
“The lowbrow way of forgetting oneself is to get drunk, to be diverted with entertainments, or to exploit such natural means of self-transcendence as sexual intercourse. The highbrow way is to throw oneself into the pursuit of the arts, of social service, or of religious mysticism. These measures are…”— Alan W Watts, amazon.com
“Hailed by the whole, one can become healed through ecodelic practice precisely because the subject turns back on who they thought they were, becoming aware of the existence of a whole, a system in which everything 'really is' connected—the noösphere. Such a vision can be discouraging and even fright…”— Richard M. Doyle, amazon.com
“Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.”— E. M. Cioran, amazon.com
“I am the prototype, the perfect American. Half out of control, violent, drunk, high on drugs, carrying a .44 Magnum. Rather than being strange, I may be the embodiment of the national character... all the twisted notions that have made this country the beast it is.”— Hunter S. Thompson, flickr.com
“The more advanced the technology, on the whole, the more possible it is for a considerable number of human beings to imagine being somebody else.”— David Riesman, amazon.com
“Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of the self.”— Sarah Manguso, amazon.com
“In college, reading all those Greek tragedies and listening to the lectures about them, I would think, rather blithely, 'Well, that tragic flaw thing is nicely symmetrical: whatever makes Oedipus heroic is also—' What did I know then? Nothing. I didn’t feel in my bones as I do now that what powers o…”— David Shields, amazon.com